AI assistants now answer the questions your readers used to type into Google, often using your content. Are they citing you, or sending people to a competitor? Unsourced is the WordPress plugin for Unsourced, the evidence layer for AI search, also known as GEO (generative engine optimization), AEO (answer engine optimization), or AI SEO.

Unsourced shows independent publishers and content creators which AI assistants cite them, who is really crawling their site, and whether their fixes actually move the needle, backed by verified evidence, not the inferred “AI visibility scores” most tools sell.

Server-side bot detection: catches the bots that skip JavaScript

Most analytics tools are blind to AI crawlers because bots like GPTBot and ClaudeBot never execute JavaScript. This plugin runs inside WordPress at the PHP level, checks every request against 22 known AI bot signatures, and logs each visit to your Unsourced dashboard with zero impact on page load time. The server-side layer is what actually catches AI crawlers, and the plugin adds no JavaScript to your pages.

Bot Trust: verified, impostor, or unverifiable

Anyone can put “GPTBot” in a User-Agent string. Unsourced verifies each crawler’s true identity against the operator’s published IP ranges and forward-confirmed reverse DNS (FCrDNS), then sorts every visitor into Verified, Impostor, or Unverifiable, with honest, copy-paste block rules. You see who is genuinely OpenAI or Anthropic, and who is just wearing the badge.

AI citation monitoring: are they citing you or a competitor?

Beyond crawl detection, Unsourced runs weekly citation checks across 7 AI models, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity. It generates high-intent questions tailored to your actual content topics (the same kind of questions your audience types into AI assistants), then checks whether the AI cites your domain or sends users to a competitor instead.

Every check is logged: which AI platform, which prompt, whether you were cited, what context surrounded the mention, and which competitor domains appeared instead. You get a clear picture of your AI search presence across all 7 models Unsourced monitors.

Origin Signal: live crawl or training data?

When an AI assistant’s answer reproduces your wording, Unsourced checks whether a verified AI crawler (caught by this plugin’s server-side detection) actually fetched that page in the same window. If it did, the citation is backed by a live crawl rather than older training data. Each match is logged with a timestamp and the scan window it belongs to.

Combined with your bot-visit logs and citation results, that gives you a documented, timestamped record of live use of your content, a starting point for licensing conversations or escalation.

Measured lift: did your fix actually work?

When Unsourced flags a gap (a topic where AI recommends a competitor instead of you) and you act on it, you can mark it actioned. Unsourced then re-checks that exact topic about a week later and tells you whether your citations actually moved: measured evidence of a change, not a promise. No causation is overclaimed; you simply see the before and after.

What you see in your dashboard:

Which AI bots visited, which pages, and how often, and which are Verified, Impostor, or Unverifiable
Your citation rate across all 7 AI models: ChatGPT, ChatGPT (web search), Claude, Gemini (grounded search), Grok, Meta Llama and Perplexity
Which competitor domains are cited instead of you, and for which topics
Whether each citation came from a live crawl of your page or from older training data
Whether a fix you actioned produced measured lift on its topic
Weekly AI Visibility Audit and Evidence Report PDFs, generated from your live data

Detected bots (22 signatures):
* GPTBot, ChatGPT-User & OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI)
* ClaudeBot & anthropic-ai (Anthropic)
* PerplexityBot & Perplexity-User
* CCBot (Common Crawl)
* Google-Extended, GoogleOther, Google-CloudVertexBot
* Bytespider (ByteDance / TikTok)
* cohere-ai, Diffbot, Amazonbot, YouBot
* Meta-ExternalAgent
* Applebot-Extended
* omgilibot, PetalBot, Timpibot, BrightBot

External Services

This plugin sends data to Unsourced (https://unsourced.app), an external service that logs and displays AI bot activity and citation intelligence for your site. A connection to this service is required for the plugin to function.

What data is transmitted:

Your site URL
The URL of the page being visited by the bot
The detected bot name and raw User-Agent string
The visitor IP address

When data is sent:

Only when a valid Unsourced API key has been configured in the plugin settings. Bot event reporting fires only when a request matches a known AI bot signature, sending the details above. The plugin also contacts Unsourced when you connect and verify your account, sending your site URL and API key. Human visitors are not affected by bot reporting.

Service links:

Website: https://unsourced.app
Terms of Service: https://unsourced.app/terms
Privacy Policy: https://unsourced.app/privacy

Unsourced – AI Bot Monitor & AI Search Citation Tracker

External Services